Healthcare improvement isn’t about working harder—it’s about better systems, better leadership, and a culture that supports learning and speaking up. This archive brings together blog posts, podcasts, and reflections on Lean healthcare, patient safety, quality improvement, leadership, and continuous improvement. Many of these posts draw on real hospital experiences and lessons from Deming, Toyota, and frontline healthcare teams, with a consistent emphasis on respect for people and learning from mistakes.
It’s a double reader letter day… I was asked, by a healthcare professional, about where she could find Lean Healthcare conferences. I’ll share my list and links below, both the events focused on Lean Healthcare as well as those with…
I received a question from a reader, which I’m sharing and posing here (with the reader’s permission and removing identifying information). The question: Having only a year of experience in the healthcare industry, and almost 30 years of (quality and…
Last weekend was the start of the college football season (Go ‘Cats!) and tonight is the “kickoff” of the NFL season, which (of course) starts with an opening kickoff. And, I mean “American football,” for my global readers. So, in…
I wish I could attend in person, but I’ll be presenting, via recorded video, to a Lean healthcare conference in Spain in September, talking about the present and future of Lean healthcare in the U.S., as well as Kaizen and…
Ted Stiles is one of the handful of key recruiters I know in the world of Lean healthcare. Disclosure: I recently joined the advisory board for the firm Stiles & Associates, for which I receive a stipend. He was interviewed…
Many of you have emailed me about this horribly sad story: “Toledo hospital nurse accidentally throws away healthy donor kidney during transplant surgery.” As a blogger, I wish I could go to the “gemba” to really help investigate and find…
If your organization blocks access to YouTube… shame on them. The videos I’m sharing here are two reasons you should insist they open access to the world of Lean healthcare education that exists there. Today, I’m sharing two videos produced…
Thanks to Karen Martin for hosting yesterday’s webinar that I gave based on my book (with Joe Swartz) Healthcare Kaizen. The title was somewhat cheeky — “The Suggestion Box is Dead.” But, long live kaizen as a style of continuous…
Here is about five minutes of video (no longer available, sadly) of Paul O’Neill (former CEO of Alcoa and former Treasury Secretary) talking about the power of Lean healthcare on CNBC. O’Neill talks about leading organizations like Virginia Mason, Intermountain,…
Picking up a feature I was doing a few months back, the backlog of stuff I’ve read and wanted to blog about has grown… that inventory becomes this post. Here are links to some varied articles I’ve read recently that…
Since moving to San Antonio in May, I’m struck by what a green, pretty city this is. Pictured at left was a day last week when I had a chance to walk from the co-working space and community Geekdom to…
Last week, I blogged about the 1989 New England Journal of Medicine article by Dr. Donald M. Berwick, “Continuous Improvement as an Ideal in Health Care.” Dr. Berwick wrote that kaizen (as continuous improvement) is not alien to healthcare, as…